A West Bank day

Living in Palestine means getting used to being stopped at any time. But checkpoints are not just about the people who have been killed there, the pregnant women who have lost their babies, and the sick who have died because they were made to wait — they offer a unique opportunity to see how occupation works. Humanitarian organisations have counted over 500 checkpoints. They dictate the rhythm of our lives. They can be permanent, temporary, mobile, seasonal — the coloniser decides. Some are “international”, such as the one between Gaza and Israel. Others divide the West Bank into many separate entities, theoretically part of three discontinuous zones — under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) for security, jointly managed, or entirely under Israel’s control. This gives the PA a power that is illusory, since in practice Israeli police and soldiers can set up a mobile militarised roadblock where and when they want, as in Al-Bireh, a few hundred metres from the Muqata, the headquarters of the Palestinian president, in Ramallah.

Checkpoints are the result of a deliberate policy, and reveal all the nuances of the occupier’s idea of the Other. With modern tools for subjugating the body (barriers, turnstiles, scanners), biopolitics, as described by Michel Foucault, is made real: society exerts physical control over individuals.

These checkpoints are not just for regulating people’s movements or checking their identities, as they might be in other parts of the world. They symbolise Israel’s classification of Palestinians according to their place of birth; this enables a refinement of the arbitrary nature of the coloniser’s control, expressed in collective punishments that prevent the inhabitants of a particular zone from entering or leaving. Checkpoints create social categories, official and unofficial representatives, passes, requirements to have a VIP card or be a businessman. The colonialist classifications make checkpoints places that differentiate between Palestinians.

Being allowed to pass through depends on the whim of the soldiers on duty. Beyond this systematic, permanent humiliation, Palestinians can be subjected to interrogation on their own land. Anything is possible — being struck because a guard takes a dislike to you, detention, arrest. You can be kept waiting for five minutes or for hours. There’s no limit to what could be at risk: a visit, a meeting, a job, freedom, even your life.

Checkpoints influence people’s behaviour, their mood, and their relations with each other as well as the occupier. They reflect the relationship between dependent and provider, as described by the writer Albert Memmi, and reveal colonisation as an archetypal process of domination. After the Oslo accords, the new Palestinian security forces set up their own checkpoints, mirroring Israel and internalising colonial logic. At the Abu Holy checkpoint in the middle of the Gaza Strip in 2005, children were made to walk alongside vehicles coming through to guarantee to Israeli soldiers that the vehicles weren’t hiding explosives or suicide bombers.

Checkpoints can generate income for those on the margins, and small-time opportunists. A Palestinian PR firm has put up an advertising billboard at the Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah, normalising the checkpoint as part of the economy. Israel has contracted out some checkpoints to private security firms. Palestine’s minister of public works, who has no power to dismantle them, has been seeking funds to improve the flow of people through the Qalandia checkpoint. But by financing alternative routes instead of those currently throttled by the Israelis, international organisations with EU support are becoming partners in a “development” that normalises the imprisonment of an entire people.

The photographic report ‘Checkpoint Chronicle’ was compiled by Sandra Mehl between 2009 and 2011. The Bethlehem checkpoint (centre and bottom left, top and bottom right) has been the main crossing point for Palestinians approaching Jerusalem from the south since Israel started building the separation barrier in 2002.

The Israeli association Marsom Watch monitors the violence and humiliation facing those passing through checkpoints. Limited manpower and technology cause delays and scuffles at busy times. Hundreds queue from 6am at Eyal, near Qalqilya in the northern West Bank (top centre). During Ramadan, thousands pass through the Qalandia checkpoint, on their way to Muslim holy sites in East Jerusalem (top left, centre, bottom centre).

Humanitarian organisation Btselem reported 96 fixed checkpoints in the West Bank this April; according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, there were also 361 mobile ones — last December, when tensions were high, there were 456. (Photos selected by Laetitia Guillemin)

Abaher Al-Sakka &
Sandra Mehl

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Translated by George Miller

Abaher Al-Sakka teaches sociology at Birzeit University near Ramallah.